Well it has been a really long time since my last post but being “self quarantined”, not really but we just don’t want to tempt the issue either… We are staying out of crowds, away from people and other very important things… but before all this got to be THE THING… we were busy as normal…
So jumping way back into early February we made the trip to Denver to see Sherrie’s oncologist and at the same visit she met up with a previous OSU student from Nutrition… that is now working at the UCHealth center in Aurora… no names to protect the innocent?
Shortly after this we went to Oklahoma to check on things, Her father, and let the damn snow catch up to us…
At the Stillwater house… at least the pond wasn’t frozen over like in Colorado… but was a pretty snow and it didn’t last long…
For all those that think Oklahoma is just wide open prairie and nothing… I saw these fresh logs at a truck stop there, and it was a local name on the truck…
Pretty big stuff and not sure why the holes in them but assume they will be tied together somehow?
Of course we have had multiple snow storms, and a few were rather large but not huge like they could have been…
This storm was early March… had a bit of wind s it was deep in spots and bare on spots… we also made a trip to Denver to watch GS#1 play hockey… this was just a match before the next weeks tournament… warm-up I guess? but they did fine in this one…
I know you can’t tell which one he is… but in the first picture, the little guy is GS#2 and the one nearest to the box is GS#2… He is in all these pictures… and looking pretty good. But what do I know, other than he likes it and plays hard…
Last weekend we made a short trip to Albuquerque. I had missed the renewal of my TSA-prepass/Global entry (nice to have if you are traveling just about anywhere) so I applied to renew and the only location I could get to quickly , cheaply, and would make a nice outing was the ABQ airport TSA office so I signed Sherrie up as well and we both did the interview there last Monday to complete the process. The trip included a nice drive down the mountains on I-25… with several stops along the way… I saw these and couldn’t resist. They are on the north side of Trinidad..
Ok, what was so interesting about this place…?
well this for one… not sure if it was a cross of ghost busters and alien adventure or ?
This one… imagination and putting away all the kid’s dolls?
Just testing out the color combinations here?
I would have thought maybe a bug theme would have worked better?
? I don’t know, a combo of Medusa? ad dragon and other stuff? It is one of those you just can’t UNSEE…
a Bus-t-gator…eats kids… ?
A roadside rock with a hole in it… strange how some volcanic activity worked out… lot of that along the front of the mountains down I-25, strange geology. In NE New Mexico there are a lot of “extinct” volcano’s that were “cinder cones” and had lava flows out from below the cone… Capelin is one of the most visible and you can drive to the top…
Borrowed from internet to show Capelin…
just neat scenery along this road..
And a show of hard times long gone?
It was a bit after this that we turned off to take in Ft Union
It is a national park now… and since we were about the only visitors I got to ask the ranger some questions… and learned a few things. We also set through a short video they had on the Fort and that was a really good video with explanations of the history of it and the area…It was the largest Fort in the west and was used to supply a multiple of other smaller forts from all over the west. It was set on or near the Santa Fe trail, and It was responsible for maintaining traveler safety during the migrations, commerce with Santa Fe, and it repelled the western threat from the Confederates. Great history there and I had no idea it was that important to the Union control of the west…
There were actually three forts… the first was poorly built and not very secure and didn’t last but a few years and then the STAR fort shown I outline in the pictorial above was the second, built around the Civil war years and then the much larger Fort above that that was actually for the staging of the Santa Fe trail… At it’s peak it had from 1200 to 1500 troops stationed there along with families and others… it had a hospital of 124 beds? and during it’s operations it served over 2400 patients both military and civilian. The ranger also said during the peak there were as many as 100 wagons a day going through the Fort on the trail… so it had to be big. not much stands today… some preserved adobe walls that show the immense size of the thing and a lot of the walls of the hospital are still up… The best thing about this National Park… IT’s FREE!…
I don’t know why we had not been there in all these years of being so close and going by it numerous times we just hadn’t stopped in…
From there we went on in to LasVegas NM. we needed gas and Lunch… of course we stopped at a NM favorite… Blakes Lotaburger… there are a bunch of them in NM…
and I got a “green chili” burger also a NM standard…. It competes well with Whataburger… but different.
In Las Vegas we did a little driver around and found a few interesting things…
the hotel next to the train station… been there a while I am thinking…
A top heavy house, or business or ?
We moved on to ABQ and ran into the rain, snow, rain on the pass by Santa Fe… so hustled on in… got our room and then went looking for Green chili…
Only place open past 8pm near us was Frontier Restaurant across from UNM… so we tried it… it was ok… not what I had expected but ok..
Their green chili is a hamburger stew… with potatoes… different but I had had the same way back in the 70’s at a couple of restaurants near Pueblo… and way out at Cheyenne Wells…
We did out interviews the next morning and ran into a bunch of people from Colorado all doing the same things since they couldn’t get into the Denver airport for at least a year to do the interview…
After that I went looking for more green chili… see the direction here and why I was happy to go to ABQ… ? We went to a highly rated family based place on the SW side of town…
It was good but not much different than what we have here in Monument… the green chili is more of a sauce and not the pork based “gravy” I was looking for but they did have the “Stuffed Sopapillia” I like so I went with that and almost forgot to get a picture, I looked too good to wait…
You get the idea… although it was a lot more before I got that picture… but I felt good by this time and then remembered “PICTURE FOOL”…
If you don’t take a picture it didn’t happen right… but if your half way through and get the picture it must have been pretty good… Sherrie had the Chicken Enchiladas and they were pretty good too… yea we traded portions for tasting…
We had driven by OLD TOWN as well and it was busy but not overly so… spotted a couple of museums we need to go back for some day… and then figured we better get on the road if we were to get home or near home by dark… so off we went…
WE bought gas just north of ABQ at the KEWA Pueblo turn off – HWY 22 crossing off I25. I saw the sign and hit the brakes and got off I-25 and Sherrie what was wrong… I said if the sign is right we get gas… $1.88. Everything before and after had been at least 30 cents more and some 60 cents more a gallon… hey get it cheap when you can… If it were a bit earlier and we wanted some turquoise we should have made the trip on up to the Pueblo as this is one of the higher rated turquoise jewelry tribes and they have their own mine… but we have plenty of turquoise jewelry and it was late…
We then went on up through Santa Fe and then up the Valley highway into the San Luis Valley, since we were familiar with that and wanted to see the changes… one thing I don’t remember is all the Casino’s north of Santa Fe… there is one every 5 or 10 miles… and on the way we passed
Camel rock… and there is a Casino on the other side of the road…
In that area as we went through small village after small village I got this one too…
cool old church…
I believer this was in Espanola… as there were a lot of murals along the way and I didn’t get near enough pictures..
We traveled up and at some places you could see the Rio Grande – Grand Canyon… starts up in Colorado between San Luis and Manassas and runs down almost to Espanola…
We stopped in Taos as Sherrie had read up on a nice yarn shop there so we made that and of course she got some special yarn to make something for her oncologist Dr…
Not being hungry since we had overloaded on various green chili things we moved on… although I think there was a good place in Taos but we passed that up for now… we traveled on up through San Luis and along Wild Horse Mesa we did spot a group of wild horses… in all the years I had not seen the wild ones out in the open… and of course by the time I saw them it was too late for a pic… In the 70’s when we lived there the Wild Horse Mesa was a big development and they had / have lake front lots for sale and I guess they sold a lot of stuff up there, we did see a few houses and there were a few left over “hippy” spots on the lower areas out front… but the roads were all really poor now and I am not sure how the better stuff has survived up on top and toward the lake… likely they come in from San Luis on the north side and up along the lake? I never made it up and over to see the development as we couldn’t afford it back then and even thought it was a bit out of reach as they were not providing any services other than some scratched out roads… I know at one time they had scratched off a runway for people to fly in but not sure what that is now… I did look it up and there is still some info on the Real Estate? and I guess you do still come in from the west? probably still a lot of stuff available…ha!
Interesting stuff now with Google maps and sat pictures… I looked it all up and things come back to memory..
They have a community building and I see a few other houses up close to the lake but not much else and plenty for sale ‘CHEAP”… then it hit me about another development of the 70’s … there was to be a ski area built south of Amalia up near Rio Costilla… and by the arial I can see the scratched out development and they even had scratched out the ski area but I think it was on the dry side and never took off either… It was called Ski Rio… all the big ideas with out a lot of real planning and knowledge and a lot of wasted money… or maybe they sold just enough to capture their costs? not sure
When we pulled through San Luis I looked, and yes, Emma’s is still there and still for sale like it has been for the past 10 years or more. it was a great place to eat, great food, with a lot of local atmosphere… would be shut down in todays inspections… the screen door had a hole in it for the dog to come and go… she had a huge wood stove in the back with like 8 or more cover holes on it… that she prepared the tortillas and some really great enchiladas… but that was in the 70’s and the south 2/3 was a bar with a semi dividing wall open at the top. They say it was a wild place on weekends… I only went at noon on work days down that way as I don’t speak the proper language.
On up the road out of San Luis we could see the familiar Blanc Peak…
a pretty important maker for the San Luis valley…
We then took hwy 160 east over to I-25 and the short route home and one the east side got a great pic of the Spanish Peaks…
was a lot of burned out area on both sides of La Veta pass from the recent big fires up there… but that happens, when idiots get free…
It was a great , but short trip… we need to do it again going the other direction and maybe down the west side of the valley and maybe take in the train rides in the valley? there are two there now… that will have to be planned out soon…
This has gotten way too long so to close… this is what the CDC means in how we should now greet people…
WD0AJG